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It’s a truism of the tourism industry that makes our fine city tick: Say something often enough and it becomes real. Even if it’s really not.

America’s finest city? Tell me more! Tell me you’re kidding.

Two weeks ago, I suggested that it’s time to mothball our misleading motto. Many of you agreed. I have the emails to prove it. Now it’s time to share a few. Our evolution is up to you. Well, to two of you in particular.

This is the story of how fine became finest, and how finest could become something else altogether — anything else, for Pete’s sake. (Or, more accurately, for everyone’s sake but Pete’s. ...)

Forty years ago, the Republican National Committee stuck it to San Diego by calling shenanigans on our metropolis and moving the GOP convention to Miami.

The day of the committee’s vote, then-San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson retaliated, proposing the best Plan B ever for the week of Aug. 21.

Wilson proclaimed that week “the week of San Diego America’s Finest City,” and he invited “wise visitors” to “come and celebrate it with us.”

(You know, as opposed to the foolish ones who’d be in Miami or elsewhere.)

The slogan outlasted the week. It even outlasted acrimony with the Republican National Committee.

Who can forget the 1996 Republican convention held here, or that its cost contributed to our pension woes, which in turn gave us a new slogan: “Enron by the sea”?

America’s finest city? That slogan has an arrogance we don’t. It’s too open to argument and interpretation, too difficult to quantify, too dated. It’s time to tout something more real, more measurable.

City officials had the right idea in August 2005 when, amid a federal probe of city finances, they dropped the superlative from San Diego’s website.

“We couldn’t stake that claim anymore,” a spokeswoman said then. “We were taking too many hits.”

Yet four months later, with the city still being pummeled in the local and national press, newly elected Mayor Jerry Sanders made one of his first official acts a restoration of the finest motto — simply “because we are,” he said.

“I love this city and have no doubt that our citizens make this America’s finest city,” Sanders said at his swearing-in ceremony. “It’s business, academia, arts and culture, the military that make this city one of the most desirable places in the world to live and work. My goal will be to re-create government both in form and function so that it matches this distinction.”

A few weeks later, none other than Neil Morgan, one of San Diego’s most revered chroniclers, equated the phrase to “a political con game.”

If it’s a con, it’s a long con. San Diego has had other slogans, but none has lasted four decades. A furniture store owner concocted “Heaven on Earth” for San Diego in the 1930s. Then-mayor Frank Curran and ex-mayor Charles Dail crafted “City in Motion” in the 1960s after Time magazine dubbed San Diego “Bust Town, U.S.A.” Tourist officials tested “Always in Season” in the 1990s. And mayoral candidate Nathan Fletcher offered up “World’s Most Innovative City” before voters rejected it and him this year.